Expectancy Violations Theory: Summary

Expectancy Violations Theory or EVT is a theory developed by Judee Burgoon which seeks to explain factors in our communication with other people that leads us to decide how we will react.

EVT is rooted on the study of proxemics which according to Edward Hall is the study of people's use of space as a special elaboration of culture.

EVT is composed of three main concepts which are all interconnected to form one theory-EVT.

Expectancy

Expectancy is defined as what we expect the person we are conversing with, to do. For example if I am a VIP, I would expect that people will respect me therefore, they will stay at a respectable distance away from me. Expectancy are determined by several factors:1)By context which is the cultural conversational norm.2)by relationship which is how open you are to the person you are conversing with.3)By Communicator Characteristics which can refer to the characteristics of the person whom you are conversing with and which causes you to like the person therefore resulting in better communication.

Violation Valence

When you're expectancy of a person is not satisfied and what your conversation partner did was deviant from what you expected, we call that a violation; which leads us to Violation Valence. Violation Valence or VV(my personal abbreviation) refers to how we measure the degree of the violation committed. VV can be positive or negative. For example, a person behaved differently from how you expected him to behave. For example he may have rubbed his palm across your face, a gesture you didn't expect from him, therefore, he committed a violation. Now you determine whether you liked what he did or not-which can give you a positive or negative VV, after which you can now decide how to react.

However, not all violations are easily decoded and according to EVT, when the meaning of an action is unclear, we interpret the violation according to how the violator can affect our lives.

Communicator Reward Valence

Do you ever wonder why even if we are roughhoused by some people, we don't get back at them? One reason would be because we think that we can achieve more if we don't offend them. This is illustrated by the Communicator Reward Valence or CRV(my own abbreviation). CRV presents that we do a mental audit of our likely gains and losses if we react in a certain way. If we think that gains would outweigh the losses, then we react in a way that is appealing to the person we are communicating with. This explains why for example, our boss scolds us yet we remain passive because we know that by being so, we can retain our jobs and if we don't, we get fired.


These concepts make up the theory of EVT and these can help us in our daily socializing. For example, I learned that the more you know a person. the more you can afford to commit violations without offending the person. However, if we don't know a person that well yet, then we better adhere to the social norms set by society.